PNG Transparency

Screenshots from Arena beta-3b for Linux

These are half-scale JPEG screenshots of the pngs-img.html, png-IceAlpha.html, and
png-MagnoliaAlpha.html pages, as well
as two external pages by Chris Lilley and Glenn Randers-Pehrson. They
were taken by Greg using a Linux/libc5 binary of Arena beta 3b (a.k.a.
"version 0.3.02") dating from 1996 or so; later versions were improved
in many ways, but Greg never managed to get another working build.

Click on the half-scale images to see the full-scale, 24-bit PNG images
(496997, 217294, 422155 and 104585 bytes, respectively, for the first set).

Arena's rendering of PNG transparency is essentially perfect, but version 3b
predated a number of HTML 3.2 features (especially related to tables and
alignment, as in the shot of Chris Lilley's inline-alpha-table page above),
and it simply didn't support others that were already in common use at the
time. The most obvious of these is the BGCOLOR attribute of the BODY tag;
in the absence of a background image, Arena always uses its own ``sandy''
background rather than the specified color (which is a pale green in the
case of the first screenshot). Even with a background image, as in the
second and third screenshots above, transparent images are rendered against
Arena's default background, which leads to some ugly effects.